Suddenly, it was all over—at least the Mexico part was. Pat’s role was finished, and the fight scenes were all done. The crew was packing up and getting ready to return to L.A., take a week for Thanksgiving and then two weeks to finish the shoot in the United States. I got up one morning at three-thirty and set off on the three-day marathon, driving diagonally across the country back to Massachusetts. I wanted to hit the border early, to get across before the commuter traffic began, but it didn’t work. My eighth time driving across the country and the sixth time by myself. The magic was long gone.
I was surprised to see a few columns in Arizona, big fires pushing up smoke. It was late in the season, November, way late for Arizona to be burning.
A FIGHTER’S HEART
In consequence again of those accursed laws of consciousness, anger in me is subject to chemical disintegration. You look into it, the object flies off into the air, your reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which there is no one to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left again—that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can.
—Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
There comes a moment when we stop creating ourselves.
—John Updike
I was back in western Massachusetts, at Amherst Athletic, training for another MMA fight and on a deadline to finish this book. MMA still hooked me on a personal level, because of the added complexity of the ground game. Not that I had mastered stand-up, by any means—that is another endless quest. But with the ground element, MMA allows the thinking fighter more options, which takes away from some of the sheer athleticism and reflexes that win boxing fights. I don’t have the reflexes, so I’m working on the thinking. Also, getting hit in the head is bad for you, and that’s the main work of boxing.
I was working with my old friend Kirik Jenness, who had been involved with this project from the start, more or less. Kirik had taken me under his wing and refused all payment. “I don’t take money from fighters,” he said, even though he was privately training me every day for an hour or more. Kirik coached, refereed, and cornered for fighters at all levels, from the UFC on down to the lowliest shows. He had a genuine love for the sport, and he ran the largest MMA Web site (www.mma.tv), but he wasn’t trying to get rich. I was back in the amateur atmosphere, a small college town; for kids and men who fight in these amateur MMA shows, it wasn’t about money, either. So what was it about?
Kirik and I did light MMA, we put on the little gloves and worked for position, and I came hard with knees and the clinch. “You’ve got a lot of aggression, which is good,” he said. “You’re relentless, and you’re almost in shape.” I had learned what fighting has to be—I understood the urgency of it. Aggression plays a big role.
The brain science, the “neuropyschology,” of aggression (as my friend Michelle Ward, who has a PhD in clinical neuroscience, attempted to explain to me), places aggression in two regions of the brain: in the limbic system, which is in the core, and in the prefrontal cortex, which is behind the forehead. The basic thinking in the scientific community says that the impulses for aggression come from the core, and control of the impulses happens in the prefrontal cortex. So any damage to the prefrontal cortex can change things, Michelle said—“even slight brain trauma, often so light it is unnoticed, from head injuries can lead to more aggressive and impulsive behavior.” Then what comes first for fighters, the chicken or the egg? They get hit in the head, which makes them more aggressive and more prone to get hit in the head.
It does mess you up—there’s no question. All fighters joke about forgetting things, and all of us have gone home with a headache from sparring and not slept well and not been right for a few days. More than once. That’s the long, slow road to punchiness—don’t fool yourself, those are mild concussions.
There’s a psychiatric tool called the Sensation Seeking Scale. You answer a bunch of questions, and the scale determines whether you are a “sensation seeker” or not, the idea being that the serotonin levels of certain people are lower than average, so in order for those people to feel anything—excitement or anxiety—they need greater than normal stimulus. This is a common thought—the idea of “adrenaline junkies” has been around for a while. I scored pretty high on the SSS, but I’m not an adrenaline junkie—I can stop anytime I want. Sure.
Michael Kimmel, in his book Manhood in America, talks about the “homosociality” of the manly arenas (sports, business); for a man, the most important thing is “his reputation as a man among men.” Men need to prove their masculinity to one another. I thought of the lack of women in all the gyms I’d been in; fighting is essentially a man’s world. Of course, there are exceptions, but a woman fighter isn’t important in a man’s world.
Konrad Lorenz, the author of On Aggression, understands where this “homosociality” comes from. Lorenz studied tropical reef fish and geese, and used the observed behaviors to draw inferences about all vertebrates and thus ourselves. He first noticed that, on the reef, “fish are far more aggressive towards their own species than any other” (outside of eating and being eaten, of course). The male fish viciously attack other male fish of the same species, the females the females, while allowing the myriad others to coexist peacefully.
Lorenz papaphrases Charles Darwin when he says that “the strength of the father directly affects the welfare of the children” and goes on to say that in herds (and any family unit), the rival male fights lead to stronger males and greater evolutionaary success. There is a “survival value” in herd or family defense that strong males contribute directly to.
So the strong homosocial element of masculinity makes perfect sense, in evolutionary terms. Those that fight each other harder do better. Lorenz takes interspecies aggression several steps further. He talks about geese and says that two furiously aggressive animals must bond and live together in a small space, all without weakening intra-species aggression. They have evolved inhibitors, behavior-changing devices, that turns the aggression they normally feel toward others of their species into something else when they mate. The same thing, albeit in a more complex way, takes place among men and women of the same tribe or family unit, bound together for increased success against the outside world. Lorenz writes that friendship is found only in animals with “highly developed intra-specific aggression,” and goes on to say that the more aggressive the animal, the deeper the friendship. The ability to love and form bonds has evolved as a way to temper aggression, to turn it into something more powerful when defending hearth and home. Friendship and love are essentially evolutionary by-products of aggression. Men and women who form these deep bonds—who evolved ways to mitigate interspecies aggression—have greater sucess in passing along their genes.
That’s the secret: It’s all about love.
Kirik and I sat around and talked about fighting, why Greco-Roman wrestlers are better at MMA than freestyle wrestlers. (Kirik thinks it’s the higher base, which is more like a boxing or kickboxing stance, and the proclivity for hand fighting.) Kirik has refereed hundreds of these matches at the amateur level, and has seen it all. He talked about how the range for punching in MMA is different from that in boxing. You can’t stand in and trade with four-ounce gloves on—you’ll get sliced to bits—so you stand back and come in hard. The jab is more of a straight hard left than a light jab. I was reminded of the old bare-fisted fighters, who would throw two or three punches a minute, probably because bare-fisted would slice you up even worse. Zé Mario had said that about the old vale tudo fights without gloves, that they were bloodbaths.
We gossiped a lot about fighters we knew, as Kirik knew everybody, and one day I said, “Tim Sylvia has badder intentions than most big men—it gives him an edge.” That train of thought led me right back to myself—I don’t really have the bad intentions. I haven’t been damaged. My father didn’t beat me or leave—my childhood was great.
I could feel that changing a little, though: All the fighting had made me a little more receptive to the idea of hurting someone. I could do it easily now. But still, I didn’t have the basic rage that you need to fight, and I said as much to Kirik. And then I thought, Doth the lady protest too much? I had endless dreams of fighting, and “knee-on-belly” was my new favorite thing, a position from which you could hit a guy but he couldn’t hit you, and I would love to get there in a fight. Which meant I wanted to hurt somebody.
I went to the only shrink I knew, a nice guy named Stuart Bicknell; I’d gone to high school with his daught